Some places are not meant to be lingering places. They are designed to be passed through quickly, to disappear from memory as soon as you have gone from point A to point B. When it happens for some reason that you linger in one, it takes on a completely different character. For instance, near Gate A2 in Chicago’s Midway airport, a placid-sounding valium-soothed woman repeats her warning every six seconds to prevent daydreaming people in the long white echoing high-ceilinged corridor from falling like felled trees when they run into the stationary ground at the end of the horizontal escalator. “Caution: The moving walkway is ending.” The people waiting at Gate A2 for their flight, which has been delayed for an hour and a half due to a thunderstorm in Denver, must nonetheless listen to this warning every six seconds until its interminably slow repetitive rhythm supplants their thoughts one by one. “Caution: The moving walkway is ending.”

In this way, there’s something very purgatorial about the long white waxed corridors, the thick wet receding echoes of the woman’s voice, and the smooth infinitesimal creeping of time. When our return flight from Croatia landed in Prague, the man below was engaged in his own version of the purgatory dance. He was doing this for 45 minutes, but that much video takes up a lot of bandwidth.

I was warned by the completely unapologetic ticket agent when I checked my bags at Midway that, due to the delay, I would miss my connection to Albuquerque tonight. I finally landed in Denver after eleven o’clock, and rather than drag my 130 pounds of baggage by cab to an overpriced hotel near the airport to sleep for four hours at most before dragging it back to the airport, I’ve decided to pass the nether-hours of the night with you, Gentle Reader, waiting for the Frontier ticket counter to reopen at five a.m. “Caution: The moving walkway is ending.” I’ve set up base camp with my laptop near the closed aluminum security gates of the food court, listening to the Beta Band on the headphones I stole from my Alitalia flight from Prague to Chicago. I couldn’t have known at the time that they would turn out to be so useful. The only source of food open at this hour is Burger King, so I had to give in and eat fast food for the first time in over a year. It tasted just like I remember it, that is, pretty fast and a bit like food. Thankfully, the Beta Band drowns out this particular corner’s repeating manta for travellers: “Please do not leave baggage unattended for any reason. Unattended items will be confiscated and may be destroyed.”

I promised Mike, our friend and colleague in Brno, that I’d share with him my first impressions upon returning to America after a year away, and these extra few hours I need to kill somehow seem like a wonderful opportunity to meander my way through those impressions. How does it seem different? What stands out now that I’ve been immersed in other cultural norms for long enough to become accustomed to them? In what ways do I feel like I’m returning to something absolutely familiar, and in what ways do I feel like I’m encountering something new? It’s tricky because a year isn’t really such a long time in the grand scheme. Mike has been living in the Czech Republic for 12 years, so he has probably been separated from his Americanness far more than C. or I have.

The change in scenery hasn’t surprised me. My brother picked me up at O’hare and had some errands to run in the city. I wasn’t surprised by the skyline or the traffic, both of which dwarf their respective analogues in the Czech Republic. Having been in a car five times at most during the past year, I was surprised that cruising on the Kennedy in my brother’s van into the city didn’t feel at all strange. Rather, it was completely familiar. I accompanied him on his rounds, chatting a bit with a couple of his customers. As we left the city, to satisfy my longing for a carne asada burrito and an [h]orchata, he stopped at one of the three restaurants called La Pasadita that lie on a one-block stretch of Ashland just south of Division. I’ve never understood why the same restaurant has three branches on the same block, but I have long understood that it is (they are?) my favorite burrito place(s) in Chicago. The burrito tasted just like I remembered it, that is, rich and spicy and delicious, with plenty of cilantro.

The observations worth mentioning number two so far. The first concerns the diner breakfast my sister and brother and I enjoyed yesterday morning at the Olde North Pancake House. The American diner ritual—a ritual with which I have a long and intimate acquaintance, dating back to the days in high school when I sometimes hit Denny’s with my friends twice a day, when I knew every diner within a fifteen-mile radius of my house and considered myself a connoisseur of the institution, able to recognize subtleties in the brownness of the decor, the bitterness of the coffee, or the “warm ya up, hon?” of the waitresses that escaped most casual observers—was strangely surreal because of my familiarity with it, combined with how different the Czech restaurant ritual is, both in itself and due to our limited command of the Czech language. C. and I managed to learn restaurant Czech pretty well, to the point where we could usually communicate our wishes to waiters and waitresses without confusion or miscommunication. Occasionally, we could even ask for certain basic substitutions (such as “without ham, please”). But almost all of our restaurant interactions consisted of repeating memorized phrases in various combinations; we were never able to carry on even the most basic conversation with the waitress. We sometimes take for granted being able to crack a joke or make friendly conversation with the people whose jobs bring them into contact with us on a daily basis. Being unable to stray at all from naming the desired item on the menu and replying to basic questions about our wishes caused us both some sadness.

So it was that I recalled the details of the American restaurant ritual as our meal progressed: The ease with which I could communicate with the waitress in English, her frequent visits to refill my weak diner coffee as often as, or perhaps even more often than I wished, the strangely familiar but exotic practice of leaving the tip on the table. It all came back to me like an old friend who I hadn’t seen since childhood but with whom I immediately felt at ease, the years since our last meeting melting away into the unaffected and uninhibited conversation that only lifelong friends can enjoy; like an old friend who, nonetheless, has met the intervening years in a surprising and just slightly unflattering way. He is so familiar, and I know before even opening my mouth what his response will be to certain questions, the way his mouth will turn down slightly and tense at the corners when he tries to keep a straight face at one of my jokes. But his skin is so pale—was it always this way?—and he has put on so much weight and carries himself with such an ingratiating hunch—has he always been so hunched? or is this new?

The second observation is the ease with which my fellow travellers chatted with each other while we waited at Gate A2 at Midway or, after landing in Denver, while we waited in line at the customer service desk to reschedule our outbound flights, or while we waited in line at Burger King for a late night meal to hold us over until breakfast. I’ve mentioned the notion of the fractured society that Mike talked about in relation to Czech society in the aftermath of communism. Such casual openness with strangers is almost completely absent.

I’ve never been one to make conversation with people in line at the grocery store or while waiting to cross the street, casually while passing in a park, or in any similar circumstance, but I am aware that many people do so and even enjoy it. As a result of my own reticence, I think it was particularly easy for me to adapt to the Czech methods of social interactions, which is simply not to interact with people you don’t know. Czechs waiting for trams and buses rarely, if ever, chat to pass the time. Czechs in elevators rarely say a word during the whole ride (though, in an odd sort of retroactive politeness they frequently bid each other na shledanou [good-bye] as they disembark at their respective floors after having not acknowledged each other’s presence for the whole of the trip). These Americans around me, on the other hand, were constantly engaging one another, whether to complain about the unapologetic ticket agent, to ask for clarification about their new connections, to ask why the wireless network in the airport seems not to exist despite numerous signs indicating its usefulness. How much simpler strange situations must be when you can simply ask the people around you for a bit of help. Yet how foreign it all is: Americans will just start talking to each other with little provocation! Imagine how strange they must seem.

Tell me more about the burritos!!! Oh, and Paul, I think it's spelled 'horchata.' Love ya!